The Assassination of Dr. King

Short background of the King’s assassination

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the veranda outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil liberties leader remained in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his method to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis health center. He was 39 years old.

In the months before his assassination

Martin Luther King ended up being significantly interested in the issue of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People’s Campaign to concentrate on the subject, including an interracial poor people’s march on Washington, and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation employees. On March 28, a workers’ protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but pledged to return in early April to lead another demonstration.

On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, “We’ve got some tough days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … And He’s allowed me to increase to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I might not arrive with you. However, I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and eliminated by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all throughout the United States, and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. 10s of countless people lined the streets to commemorate King’s coffin as it is gone by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules.

The night of King’s murder

The hunting rifle was found on the walkway next to a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel. Throughout the next numerous weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and finger prints on the weapon all linked a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit bad guy, Ray got away from a Missouri jail in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a setback. In May 1968, an enormous manhunt for Ray started. The FBI eventually determined that he had acquired a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was reasonably easy.

On June 8, Scotland Yard detectives apprehended Ray at a London airport. He was aiming to fly to Belgium, with the eventual objective, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was at the time ruled by an oppressive and globally condemned white minority federal government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King’s murder to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Three days later on, he tried to withdraw his guilty plea, declaring he was innocent of King’s assassination and had been established as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mystical man called “Raoul” had approached him and hired him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, he stated, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and left to Canada. Ray’s motion was rejected, as were his lots of other ask for a trial during the next 29 years.

Throughout the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and hypothesizing about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S. government and armed force. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists’ minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist impact. For the last six years of his life, King went through constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also kept track of by U.S. military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967. Additionally, by requiring radical financial reforms in 1968, consisting of guaranteed yearly incomes for all, King was making few new buddies in the Cold War-era U.S. government.

Over the years, the assassination has been reconsidered by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee, district attorney’s workplace, and three times by the U.S. Justice Department. The examinations all ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. Your home committee acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, including one or more accomplices to Ray, however, revealed no evidence to show this theory definitively. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him– such as his fingerprints on the murder weapon and his admitted existence at the rooming house on April 4–, Ray had a definite intention in assassinating King: hatred. Inning accordance with his friends and family, he was an outspoken racist who informed them of his intent to eliminate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.